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Subject: Re: branching factor question

Author: blass uri

Date: 03:25:00 03/06/00

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On March 06, 2000 at 06:00:20, Jan Pernicka wrote:

>On March 03, 2000 at 15:53:31, blass uri wrote:
>
>>Suppose you have a program with evaluation of 0.00 for every position so the
>>order of moves is always perfect.
>>Suppose this program does no prunning and no extensions.
>>
>>What is the branching factor of this program and how many nodes does it need to
>>search to get 17 plies in the positions that deeper blue is supposed to get 17
>>plies with no prunning and a lot of extensions?
>>
>>It seems to me that it is impossible with no hash tables to get 17 plies in 3
>>minutes even if you can search 200,000,000 nodes/second,have a perfect order of
>>moves and do no extensions.
>>
>>Hash tables can help to reduce the branching factor but how much do they help?
>>
>
>  Hi,
>let's suppose that at every position you have w moves to choose and you
>don't use any hashtables. Then (it's well known) - when using alpha-beta
>prunning - your branching factor is something like  sqrt(w) - i.e square
>root, when searching to the depth d (still the same, no extensions...),
>you have to examine about d^(w/2) (leaf) positions  (x^y means "x powered to
>y"), so you can estimate how long does it take (for your program) to search
>17 plies ahead...  Simply said - you can search two times deeper...

I think that the formula is sqrt(w)^d=w^(d/2)

If w=36 in the middle game then the formula is 6^d without hastables and f(w)^d
with the hashtables when the question is if f(w) is really close to 6.

If f(w) is really close to 6 then the claim that deeper blue could search 17
plies in the middle game with no pruning is wrong.

Uri



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